Elegant

How to spell elegant

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce elegant

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does elegant mean?

1. adjectiveGraceful, refined, and stylish in appearance, manner, or design.

Elegant in a sentence

• She wore an elegant black dress to the awards dinner.

• The architect favoured a clean, elegant design for the new library.

Where does elegant come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin elegans, the present participle of a verb related to eligere, meaning 'to pick out' or 'to select carefully'; eligere itself joins ex 'out' with legere 'to choose or gather'. The original idea, then, was someone who chooses with discernment and good taste, a sense of refined selectiveness rather than mere prettiness. Interestingly, in early Latin elegans could carry a faintly negative ring, suggesting a person who was fussy or overly dainty, before it settled into the admiring meaning of graceful and tasteful. English borrowed it through Old French in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, applying it first to people of polished manners and later to objects, designs, and even mathematical solutions of pleasing simplicity. The same legere root sits inside relatives such as 'select', 'elect', and 'eligible', and the unstressed middle vowel, which sounds like a faint 'uh', is exactly the spot where writers hesitate over the spelling.

How the word is built

• e- (from ex-: out)
• leg (from legere: to choose, select)
• -ant (adjective suffix)